


Experiments in Diplomacy

by Dulcidyne



Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: And we thought idioms were a challenge for the translators, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fluff, Getting past the 'prepare to strike first' phase, Heaven but with angara, Humor, Slow Burn, avoiding accidental cardiac arrest, building bridges and deadly weapons, cross-cultural flirtation, making up interspecies diplomacy as we go, pinkie promises, the hazards of alien slime molds, vestigial reflexes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-14 03:56:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10528470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dulcidyne/pseuds/Dulcidyne
Summary: There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. (A collection of in-between vignettes from the Tempest tech lab)





	1. Prototyping and Planning

**[[Prototyping]]**

Andromeda Galaxy is brimming with new, unspeakable wonders and one of them is tucked away inside the Tempest, cloistered in a room packed with multi-material fabrication units, omni-gel converters and the subtle, still lingering scent of all the blue plastic film she spent hours peeling off the equipment. From the beginning, it’s love at first sight and this sight is like nothing she’s ever seen before--beautiful, sleek, state-of-the-art, fully integrated haptic holographic interface, twin fabricator arms embedded with miniature stasis field generators: the tech bench. Or, as she now fondly calls it, Margaret.

Se-ah Ryder trails a fingertip over the holo display and sighs. “Well, Mags, I guess we’ll be seeing a lot less of each other from now on.”

Her eyes cut to the cot now wedged in the corner of the room.

“There’s someone else in your life now,” she jokes aloud, “and yeah, I’m a little jealous--a lot jealous--but I care about you and I’m willing to give you two some space from time to time…”  
  
The joke starts to fall flat, her voice growing more and more stilted. No more late nights working on her prototypes, no more peeling her smooshed cheek off the bench surface after nodding off while simulations run on her latest schematic. Lexi and her ominous array of psychological terms like ‘imposter syndrome’ and ‘unhealthy coping mechanisms’ will undoubtedly be thrilled over the prospect.

Awash in tangerine light, her fingers curl up to clutch at nothing and Se-ah settles onto the stacked pair of crates she’s been using as a chair for the past few weeks. Imposter is a good word for her. Her bumbling attempts at diplomacy on Aya today are proof enough of that. Awkward handshakes gone awry are definitely _not_ part of official Initiative first contact protocols.

She peeks over her shoulder at the door and seeing neither Lexi’s lovely scowl of disapproval or the carefully guarded expression of the tech lab’s newest resident, she pulls up her latest prototype schematic on Maggie’s interface.  
  
“Just after I try something real quick.”

‘Quick’ relatively speaking, of course. She _is_ over 600 years old. Even so, she suspects she’s stretching the meaning of the word, even by her ancient standards, when the muscles in her lower back begin a series of frenetic twinges after her twenty-sixth omni-blade temperature stress test. She _knows_ she’s broken the meaning entirely when hydraulic hinges hiss quietly and Jaal steps into the room. He halts mid-step the moment he spots her.

“Sorry, I’ll clear out in just a minute,” Se-ah assures him, scrambling off her perch on the makeshift chair, flushing and flustered as if she’d been caught snooping through his cot instead of adjusting the fabricator settings. Her movements are clumsy as knotted muscles ping out rubber-band snaps against her spine in protest. _Ouch._ She’s been hunched over too long.

“There is no need to…'clear out'”

Outside of a perplexed tilt of his chin at the idiom, his expression is as inscrutable as ever. He’s a difficult read for a thousand reasons, the largest being that their respective species evolved in different galaxies--no, the largest reason is probably just that she can't accurately read _anyone_ , regardless of what corner of space they hail from. ‘Just your Ryder genes’, her mom used to joke, as if having the emotional sensitivity of a potato could be reduced down to nucleotides.

“This is _your_ vessel, Pathfinder,” he adds and the emphasis says a hundred different things, not all of them good.

She ignores every single one, already entering the disposal command. Fabricator arms whir and the jumble of silicon carbide fragments suspended in Maggie’s protective stasis bubble disappear into the omni-gel converter intake.

“No, no. This is your spot. I’ll go. You’re a guest--” Kind of. Guest, envoy, possible assassin (or was that just a joke?), she’s not sure which fits best. Jaal doesn’t seem sure either. There’s wary tension in the set of his broad shoulders. Does he think she’s here to keep tabs on him? Spy on him? Something worse? Each possibility jabs against the pit of her stomach, a jostling mess of sharp edges that clatter and cut like transparent carbide shards.

She takes a step closer and she knows every bit of that carbide shard feeling is flitting across her face. Genetic or not, her inability to read people does not come pre-packaged with the ability to keep them from reading her. But at least there’s genuine warmth and apology in the tentative smile she gives him.

“I’d really like you to feel welcome Jaal.”  
  
As welcome as possible in a cramped ship full of aliens who he has every reason to suspect might turn on him at any moment. Everyone is making sacrifices, especially their newest...er...guest, so it is beyond selfish to mourn losing unfettered access to Maggie and ‘unhealthy coping mechanisms’.

“Tell me, Pathfinder.” He catches her longing glance towards the tech bench and a new expression glitters in his eyes. She can’t decide if it is amused or offended. “Is it a Milky Way custom to leave the room as soon as the person you wish to welcome enters it?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“Ah. Just yours then?”

Heat flares up her neck and her tongue can’t quite seem to get around the foot she’s managed to lodge in her mouth. She should find Lexi for prompt removal--the doctor could publish a groundbreaking case study: _‘Patient exhibited complete uvular contact with proximal phalanges--’_

“No, that’s not what I meant by--I just thought…” she trails off when the corner of his lips twitch up into a smile as if despite himself.   _Amused_. That was the look. She grins right back, a pleasant feeling buzzing up in her stomach to file away all the raw, jagged edges of her nerves. It feels good to find the humor in her complete inability to handle this situation with the aplomb and dignity people might expect from the Pathfinder. At least her shortcomings won’t be causing a diplomatic incident tonight.

He steps past her with a nod towards the bench and she settles back down on the crates, already pulling up the interface.

“Just tell me when you get tired of me and I’ll get out of your hair,” she tells him absently, too absorbed in tweaking the thermoregulator to realize she’d just dumped two more idioms on his translation software. “Otherwise, I’ll probably end up here all night trying to get this cryo-blade concept to work.”

A piece of ceramic fabricates in a fraction of a second and shatters apart even faster. She groans. Maybe it’s time to try working with a metal-ceramic composite instead. SAM pipes up with an onslaught of data on the tensile properties of various titanium alloys at subzero temperatures.  
  
“I’ll be sure to,” Jaal says but hours later when her bleary eyes blink awake long enough to check the time, it’s clear that he’s done no such thing. He also doesn’t assassinate her in her sleep, which counts as a good sign in her book.

* * *

  **[[Planning]]**

“We did it...SAM, it worked!”

The omni-blade, a razor-thin sheaf of silicon and carbon crystal lattice threaded with titanium, hovers complete in a mass-effect bubble of supercooled air and floating ice. It glitters under the overhead lights like a snow globe--the world’s deadliest snow globe, full of cutting edges and snap-freeze.

She’s on her feet when the AI’s voice finally registers.

“Calculations show that even minor impact forces will induce rapid spalling at the desired temperatures, rendering the blade unusable for its intended purpose, Pathfinder.”

Se-ah slumps back onto the crates and drums her fingers over Maggie’s sleek lip.

“We’re on the right track at least. We can try again, see if maybe the 93rd time's the charm?”

“It is improbable that results would vary to a significant degree.”  
  
“It’s called blind optimism for a reason, SAM.”

Behind her, the door hisses open and her heart rate spikes when she hears Jaal say, “As I expected. Dr. T’Perro--”

Jumping up again so fast, the crates nearly shift and topple beneath her, she cuts him off with a series of silent but frantic gestures that she can only hope will transcend language barriers. Judging by the bemused expression he fixes her with, they don’t, but at least they distract him long enough for the door to close, which means she’s safe. Lexi is especially meticulous about giving Jaal his space while they develop trust. It’s very considerate. Se-ah would do the same if not for Maggie and the fact that he’s yet to actually ask her to leave despite her constant reminders that he can and should do so whenever he wants.

“I know Lexi is looking for me,” she explains. “She's trying to get me to rest up before we leave the Faroang system and I’d really, _really_ like it if she didn’t find me working in here.”

“I see. Far be it from me to come between a woman and her--what is it you call this device again?” He’s referring to the tech bench.

She grins, leaning back against the bench and giving the top a loving pat. “Maggie. Or Mags. Margaret only when I’m mad at her.”

“That’s right. Well, you and your beloved Maggie have my discretion.”

There’s a shadow of a laugh in the rumbling depths of his voice, wedged up against his clipped enunciations. She can’t tell if he’s teasing or not. Palms on the tech bench behind her, Se-ah tilts her head to the side and purses her lips in thought.

“You promise?”  
  
The laugh startles out of him. “Must I pledge an oath of secrecy?”

“Nothing so cloak-and-dagger...er--” she pauses to gauge if the idiom needs explanation but he seems to get the gist well enough. _Interesting_. “Anyway, no. No oaths of secrecy. Just your basic angaran equivalent of a pinkie promise.”

He tips her down a look that she can practically feel thrilling up from the base of her spine. Well, that’s... _distracting._

“I’m not sure there is one.” He steps closer and holds up his hands as if to say ‘See? No pinkies’

“On Havarl, we _do_ have a customary...swear of sorts, a type of bioelectric pulse that reaffirms and seals a promise.”

“That’s fascinating.” Se-ah straightens up and holds out her hand between them, folding all her fingers down over her palm except for her pinkie. “But a bit difficult for me to manage. We’ll have to improvise. Just use your thumb.”

He smiles softly, eyes alive with barely-constrained curiosity, and does as she asks, copying her motion but leaving his thumb out. She hooks her pinkie around it and waits for it to crook in kind.

“Alright. So that’s ours, now you do yours.”

Jaal hesitates but after a second, a tingling warmth reverberates over her skin and half the muscles in her hand contract and flutter all at once. There’s no pain, just warmth and the juddering muscular spasm. But a second goes by and it starts to tickle a bit--a lot. She pulls away before she can dissolve into helpless giggles and kneads out the residual tingling with her unaffected hand.

“Fascinating,” he says, still watching her hands with curious intensity. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No, no, it just really started to tickle. Trust me, I’ve had my share of electrical burns, I would’ve known if any real damage was happening.”  
  
His hand hadn’t been affected at all--how is that possible? Insulated skeletal muscle? First chance she gets, she’s asking Lexi for access to those angaran biology textbooks the Havarl researchers forwarded her. She also makes a note not to try any angaran promise methods near the chest--accidental cardiac arrest does not strike her as a good diplomacy-building exercise.

As if on the same logic train, Jaal says, “Your species is so incredibly delicate…how you survived long enough to develop spaceflight is miraculous.”

She laughs a bit at that but her eyes take on a thoughtful cast. “Delicacy can be strength in the right context, with the right threat of extinction looming in the background.”

“True, but what happens when you finally run into the wrong threat?”

It’s like Voeld is cramming itself into their conversation, filling up every empty space with ominous meaning. What will they find in the kett facility when they try to rescue Moshae Sjefa? The kind of threat where they walk away stronger or the kind where they don’t walk away at all?

“Then you hope your shields hold up,” she jokes weakly and all it does is make the planet-sized silence even bigger.

He can’t meet her eyes anymore and for a second she thinks she sees fear on his face. But it doesn’t look like it’s for him--it looks like it’s for her. Her and her delicate human body, trying to accomplish what no hardened angaran Resistance fighter could. Part of her wonders if he’d ever give such a look to Alec Ryder. It’s the part that tells her she’s not qualified, she’s only _lucky_ and one day that luck is going to run out.

Maybe that day will come sooner than she thinks.

Suddenly furious with herself--and with Jaal and her father while she’s at it--she recoils away and turns to plant her palms face down on the top of the tech bench. The omni-blade glitters in the air, too fragile, too _delicate._

_What happens when you finally run into the wrong threat?_

Her eyes go wide.

“Shielding!”

Jaal clearly thinks she’s in the grip of a mental breakdown judging from the startled look of alarm on his face when she turns back around to face him. It’s one of his best looks yet, she wishes she could snap a picture of it for posterity. But there’s no time for any of that.

“I’ve been going about it all wrong, trying to find a material that would work at the right temperatures when this _whole time_ I should’ve been designing a way to shield the blade from the snap freeze the same way I shield myself from it!”

It doesn’t take him long. At this point, he’s already almost as familiar with omni-tool modifications as she is. The look of alarm is gone and the one that replaces it is so much better that the elated thrill of discovery careening through her veins pales in comparison to the rush pounding up from her toes and fingertips to leave her dazed and blinking back the sudden dazzle of overhead lights.

“That’s very clever.”

SAM disagrees. “Pathfinder, the logistics of enclosing a kinetic shield inside another on this scale--”  
  
“Are going to be a nightmare, yeah SAM, I know. But we’re on the right track. We’ll start on it first tomorrow.”

“I’d like to help--if I could,” Jaal offers. “There are other possible applications for the concept that intrigue me.”

She can’t stop grinning.  
  
“I’d love your help.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be filed under things I never expected to Google for a fic: Electrostimulation safety guide (avoid current traveling through the chest and neck), physiology of bioelectricity, and the question 'how do electric eels not shock themselves?' (turns out no one knows!).


	2. Observing

By the time she wrests an eyelid open the armor fabricator’s incessant beeping gives one last obnoxious chirp before falling silent, apparently satisfied.  Burrowing her face back into her folded arms to block out the light is a futile effort and her disgruntled groan fans humidity over the cool gloss of tech bench. There’s no use in chasing the last elusive scrap of rest. She’s awake now. Mostly.

Se-ah huffs another breath and straightens up slowly to a chorus of synovial joint pops and aching muscular creaks that make her feel every bit of her 6oo-some-odd years. The lights of the tech lab smear into hazy, multicolored coronas and she squints groggily, dragging her hand down over her face to knead circulation back into her cheek. A monster of a yawn pulls at her jaw and it isn’t until her mouth is grotesquely agape that she locks eyes with Jaal from between the vee of her fingers.

He’s close, leaning forward over the tech bench, reaching out, his hand hovering near her shoulder. Grogginess evaporates off her synapses in the moment it takes to register his proximity. As close as they are, she can make out tiny flecks of lavender flashing in the vivid, variegated blue of his eyes. For one tilting, disorienting second, she’s five all over again, growing her gardens of copper sulfate crystals in their stainless steel bowls ( _halmeoni_ had _not_ been as excited over the new use for the rice bowls) and watching, rapt, as faults and facets glitter violet, cobalt and cerulean when the light hits them just right.

It takes her _way_ too long to register the expression on his face. When she does, her mouth snaps shut with an audible molar on molar click.

_Exhibit A: Milky Way human. Behold the red-rimmed, sleep-swollen eyes; the ashen skin; the disheveled ruff of hair._

It’s the sort of intense fascination people reserve for things that are shockingly hideous--a mix of curiosity, awe, and utter bafflement. Given the looks and comments she received during her brief parade through Aya, she already knows there’s a huge gulf between their respective beauty standards, but she suspects her appearance is at new lows even with that already taken into consideration.

His eyes flicker over her face. “Strange. Human skin appears to be more pliant than I initially suspected...and…” He focuses on her nose. “Shinier.”

 _Shiny?_ She flinches away from the scrutiny, hand fanning across her oily face in the vain attempt to screen it from him. There’s no need, the rapt light in his eyes flickers out and he draws back his hand, violet stippling over his cheekbones. She’s too busy keeping her face from overheating to analyze what it might mean.

SAM saves her from further embarrassment by announcing. “Pathfinder. ETA to the Nol System is now four hours, forty-three minutes.”

Four hours. That means she slept through the stop in Sabeng system to discharge the FTL drive in Pas-13’s magnetosphere. It also means her new hardsuit should be--ahhh, the obnoxious beeping makes sense now.

“I was about to wake you. The armor fabricator has finished with your hardsuit,” Jaal says and his face is as unreadable as it was his first day on the Tempest.

She frowns at that and at the halting reserve in his tone, recognizing both for the distance he’s all but forgotten about maintaining lately. Judging by the regretful twinge at the corner of his mouth--there and gone in a blink--he doesn’t care for it any more than she does.

 _‘I’m not very good about being careful.’_  

No, he really isn’t. It’s clear that he thinks he _should_ be keeping her and the rest of the crew at an arm’s length more than actually wanting to at this point. The trust isn’t quite there yet, as much as they’d like it to be, and historical precedent has taught him what he risks when he lets his guard down around aliens. She gets it, she does, and his reluctant lapses back into _careful_ don’t hurt her.

But she sees the frustrated sag of his massive shoulders as he turns away from her and knows that it hurts _him._

Which doesn’t sit well with her. At all. Without a word, he retreats back to the corner with his cot and the desk, a flicker of blue illumination indicating that he’s already fiddling around with her double shielding concept.

Lexi would insist on leaving the room and giving him time to sort out whatever he’s feeling. And she probably should. It’s not like she doesn’t have years of experience being Alec Ryder’s daughter to fall back on. The one and only time she saw her dad cry, she immediately ran out of the room and they were both more than happy to pretend the whole thing never happened.

_Except…_

Except she can’t imagine Jaal going into a dim room to privately express his grief over his dying wife as if his emotions are something to be hidden away. She can’t imagine he’ll ever have a son who will hurl the accusation that he is a man who _‘would sooner be tortured by Batarians than talk about feelings with his children_ ’. Her dad’s self-imposed isolation suited him just fine where Jaal’s seems to abrade more and more each day, a slow but painful erosion she can sometimes hear in his voice and see on his face.

She doesn’t go.

“Hey, Jaal...can I ask you something?” Husky from her nap, her voice comes out thin and reedy as smoke.

“We won’t know ‘til you try.”

She didn’t plan far enough ahead to actually think of something to ask. It doesn’t matter anyway,  the door hisses open and Cora strides into the lab with a biohazard bag in hand. In the bag is a metal container, its lid obscured with a nubbly rind of bioluminescence. Cora holds it at an arm’s length. Which...considering what it is, is smart.

“Ryder. Mind explaining this?”

“I--”

“Tell me you didn’t store a sample of the slime mold on Havarl that _ate a hole into your hardsuit_ in the bio lab.”  
  
“I followed all the containment protocols. I thought it would be fine as long as I sterilized the container first so that it wouldn’t have a food source.”

Clearly, she thought wrong. Behind her, Jaal remarks, “Depriving _goshaeva_ of food was your first mistake.”  
  
Despite the baleful glower from Cora, she dares to quip over her shoulder. “Now you have input? I thought biology wasn’t your thing.”

Jaal comes up to stand by the bench to tip a pointed look down at her. “Clearly...it isn’t yours either.”

Pushed past her limit, Cora works her jaw before asking slowly, “Is this the only one?”

“Yeah. I took the scraping from my hardsuit before we sterilized it.” And then incinerated it. And then tossed the container of still-smoldering ash out the cargo bay doors and into a clump of Havarl ferns.  
  
“Good, then I only have one thing to throw out the airlock…”  It’s obvious Cora would sorely like that one thing to be Se-ah. But, ever the professional, she leaves it unsaid and exits the tech lab as fast as possible.

Feeling Jaal’s gaze on her, Se-ah glances up to catch it before asking, “ _Goshaeva..._ does that mean anything?”

“The unstoppable hunger.”

“Oh. Creepy.”

“It is relatively harmless so long as it has something to feed on--bacteria, yeasts, molds--but without food, it begins to spore. As your hardsuit learned, the spores are capable of degrading most materials after direct, prolonged contact.”

She fires off a mental ‘ _Why didn’t you tell me that?’_ to SAM but whatever the AI says to defend himself is lost when Jaal brushes his hand against her shoulder.

His palm is massive, warm and strange. But she finds that she likes the way his jointed fingers cup against the line of her shoulder blade, encompassing the full curve with ease. The touch is friendly and fleeting. She feels it all the way down to her toes.

“What in the stars possessed you to take a sample of such a thing after seeing what it could do?”

There’s that look again, the baffled curiosity and awe. She runs a hand through her hair and his eyes track the movement with a sniper’s precision.

“I wanted to know how it managed to eat away at all those compressed layers of ceramic. Do you know, is it some kind of highly acidic spore capsule? Do you think we could synthesize it? It…” She shrugs her shoulders, sheepish, remembering that he is the wrong person to ask.

“And it looked really...fascinating...beautiful, actually, in a weird, ‘could horribly kill me’ kind of way. I couldn’t just leave it, if that makes sense?”

Her shoulder is tingling, mapping out the outline of his palm as if the pleasant weight of it is still resting there.

“Yes.” He exhales softly before saying with no small amount of humor, “You really are a brave woman.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Having a headcanon about deadly slime molds is not what I expected when I started this game haha, but Havarl's bioluminescent flora was too much awesome to resist. Slime molds are the weirdest/coolest things ever. Also, anyone else grow crystals as a kid? 
> 
> I have A LOT of feelings about Jaal making friends and building trust with the crew but still having to hold back a bit and that being a difficult conflict for him to handle. The fact that he doesn't give any real details about his family until after Voeld is REALLY telling in my book (although we know he does refer to them a lot)--he's clearly still protecting them.


	3. Testing

Inertial dampeners kick in the moment the Tempest drops out of FTL on the fringe of the Nol system and a discordant metal warble shudders through the frigate, plucked from every bulkhead and bolt by invisible fingers of momentum. Se-ah stops talking. All it takes is one mechanical failure. One corroded mass effect field generator, one microscopic hull fracture, one warped bolt. And then, with no warning beyond the ominous groan of the hull, the ship would shear apart like tinfoil and spill all of them out to asphyxiate in a beautiful ocean of starlight.

It won’t happen. SAM once gave her the infinitesimal probability of spontaneous hull failure down to all 23 decimal places. There are backup systems for the backup systems, sensors and alarms and pre-flight scans that would catch any corrosion, fracture, and warp accumulated over time. In reality, it wouldn’t be one mechanical failure, but hundreds. But her heartbeat still picks up and her breath is coming faster and harder. Adrenaline builds up on her tongue, a tingling acidic zip. She grins.

“Alright ground team. Mission ready in the hour, we make planetfall in thirty,” she says and SAM transmits her voice to the ship-wide comm.

“Stop grinning, you maniac.” Liam elbows her in the side. His lopsided smile is straight of out Scott’s playbook of sibling affection and it’s both comforting and painful to see. Their personalities are a lot alike and she has to stop herself from indulging in too many comparisons--they aren’t fair to Liam or to Scott.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of Maggie,” Liam says, misinterpreting her pained wince. The stroke he gives the tech bench is downright provocative and she slaps it away with a laugh.

“You taking care of Mags means you _not_ touching her. I just finished fixing all her settings after the last time.”

“Yeah, yeah.You’re in an exclusive relationship with a machine, you do know that right?”

“I’m just giving Lexi interesting material for her next paper.”

Liam laughs and backs towards the door, still facing her when it opens up. “Keep telling yourself that. You’re the only one who believes it.”

Jaal steps inside behind him and Liam thumps him on the back as he walks past. “Hey Jaal. You stay safe down there too. _Talev do shena.”_

Stunned silence descends between the three of them. Jaal halts, momentarily taken aback, Se-ah bites back a breath and Liam’s gaze swings between the two of them, questioning until her laughter finally bursts out of her. She has to grip the edge of the tech bench, she’s laughing so hard.

“What? I just said good luck.”  
  
“That is _not_ what you said,” she informs him between gasps, bringing a hand up to wipe a tear gathering at the corner of her eyes. Her grasp on Shelesh is feeble but she’s well beyond Liam and most of the crew. When it comes to languages, she’s a fast learner, having grown up in a household with a family member whose birth pre-dated infant translator implants. She also has the benefit of peppering their resident language expert with questions at every odd hour. And an AI that can inform her when he is pulling one over on her.

It’s no surprise when this revelation rolls off him, or when the grin darting up in the corner of his mouth has the air of begrudging admiration. The thing she loves best about Liam is that he’s not picky about which end of the joke he ends up on. He likes a laugh and doesn’t take ones at his expense too seriously ( _not_ one of Scott’s fortes she reminds herself).

“Alright, alright. Jaal, I’ll be sure to pay that forward when you get back.”

Jaal doesn’t laugh, offer up a piece of deadpan wit, or turn around. Instead, his shoulders bunch up, drawn tight beneath the fluttering line of his _rofjinn_. He nods as if he hasn’t heard a word and makes his way to the desk where a new rifle mod is still open and in scattered pieces.

Se-ah and Liam exchange a glance and Liam soundlessly mouths the word ‘nerves’ before his mouth flattens into the facial equivalent of a shrug. She chews on her bottom lip in thought.

“I’ll let you finish your checks,” Liam says to her after a long pause. He throws in a good-natured wave on his way out the door. “ _Talev do shena.”_

It’s a valiant effort to lighten the mood back up again but it doesn’t work. Her adrenaline high is gone, leaving her with all the gut-churning, wobbly-kneed side effects. Se-ah bites down the last of her nutrient bar to get the sour taste off her tongue but her mouth is still too dry and it’s all she can do not to choke on the crumbling bits of artificially flavored ‘berry pie’ that taste a lot more like chemical cleaner than fruit filling.  

Hazarding a glance towards Jaal, she realizes there is nothing she can say to defuse the fraught emotion radiating up from him like a nimbus of dark energy. If Liam can’t get him to crack a smile, there’s no way she can, so for now she leaves him to finish piecing his mod together and picks back up on her own pre-mission rituals.

The new hardsuit gets five thorough scans with her omni-tool to map structural weak points in the ablative plating. Sometimes the fabricators make errors and she’s uneasy at the thought of going into the field with a brand-new suit but the alternative is braving -40 degrees C in her just her underlayer. All five come up normal, no chance a solitary shot to the center of her chest is going to shatter the whole plate in one go.

Because long-range scans indicate Voeld is a winter wonderland from Dante's 9th circle of hell, she triple checks the flexweave too--a single rupture will kill her suit’s thermoregulatory capacity and drain her power cells in minutes. The power cells themselves get their own scans plus a handful of functionality tests and she checks her shield mod housing and connections so many times she loses count.

Every scan, every test and the voice in her back of her head telling her that she’s not qualified, she’s _just lucky_ , gets a little quieter. It won’t shut up completely, she knows that by now. But it gets easier to ignore it and pretend she’s the same person she was before her dad snapped his helmet on over her head--the Se-ah Ryder who chased her adrenaline high all the way down to solid ground with the knowledge that she’s _got this_ (jet malfunction and all) _..._ and then hours later, asphyxiated in the thin atmosphere of Habitat 7, slipped into unconsciousness in 15 seconds flat, and died.  
  
Pretending to be a dead woman has its benefits.  Being able to choke down the raw, grasping panic that comes with standing on the universe’s invisible scales every waking moment and wondering how, how, _how_ is she ever going to compensate for the monumental weight of Alec Ryder’s life is just the biggest one.

Se-ah takes a shaky breath and gusts out a distracted hum while she works. The ship rumbles again as the reverse thrusters kick in, slowing their acceleration to Voeld and breaking her out of the methodical trance her pre-mission ritual lulls her into.

Jaal is still in the corner but he’s finished with the rifle mod and now he’s turning something over and over in his hands. Silver flashes Morse code flickers between his massive fingers and before she knows it, she’s beside him and peering over his shoulder.

“What’s that?”  
  
Her question doesn’t break through his scrutiny but his hands pause and unfold to reveal a piece of metal with a forked end. She stares down at it blankly.

“Do you sew Ryder?” The question is a soft reverberation in the still air.

She shakes her head but he’s not looking at her, he’s still looking at the metal prong, so she adds,“No.”

“Ah. Well, this tool is what we call _sahet._ It allows you to unmake a stitch. But more often, we use the word for another purpose. When our loved ones die, when they are taken from us, this is the word we use. It...means to be removed. Unmade.”

Silver catches the light, throws it back in slow, hypnotizing arcs.

“The first thing Moshae Sjefa taught me was that there was a time when our word for death was _sahet talesana,_ which means to unmake a stitch so that it can be sewn again. Creation through destruction. But _talesana_ was stolen from us and it was stolen so long ago, few remember what was lost. The Moshae...finds her purpose in remembering not just who we’ve lost but _what_ we’ve lost in the hope that someday we can begin anew. She safeguards _talesana_ for all angara.”

His voice, the deep, rumbling glide that shapes every word with care and consideration, falters as if his admiration, love, and devotion for the Moshae and her purpose are rocks pinning it down. He struggles for a moment to speak despite their crushing bulk.

“We _cannot_ lose her.”  
  
He looks up at her then, watery shadows of grief rippling in his blue vitriol eyes. The last time she saw eyes like that, mom’s illness was breaking over the horizon of the distant future to swallow up the present. It feels the same now as it did then: like she’s a clumsy intruder stumbling from the safety of the shallows without any idea how to navigate her way through deeper waters.  But instead of taking one faltering step back, this time she plants her feet against every panicked instinct to run and drops her hand to rest--tentative at first, then firm--on his left shoulder.

“Jaal.” Determination threads conviction through her voice. “I’ll do whatever it takes to help you find her and bring her back.”

Her promise gleams in the air between them like a platinum thread. Weighty. Unbreakable. She doesn’t have her father’s genius or training or strength but flawed and _fragile_ as she is, she’s not going to let that stop her. She’ll do everything to tip the scale back where it belongs. For Jaal. For the Moshae. For the colonists still in their cryopods waiting for a home. For everyone.

A massive palm presses down against her knuckles as his right  hand drops the tool and crosses up to envelop her own. Subtle pressure conveys a dizzying array of emotions too numerous and ephemeral to name. Fleeting, elusive impressions stipple like Braille over her knuckles. She had no idea--no clue that a touch could say so much and she wonders if she can pick up on the vocabulary of personal contact as well as she picks up on spoken languages. Right on the heels of that thought is the image of his bare skin beneath her fingertips and a not-at-all-unpleasant heat travels up from the base of her spine.

Unaware of the visual flashing through her mind, Jaal considers her sudden flush. The weight of his hand vanishes but before she can mourn the loss, the backs of his fingers brush hers. It’s more whisper than touch but she feels it like a burn.

“I've never met anyone like you, Se-ah Ryder.”

“Oh. Well.” Happiness expands in her lungs and a nervous laugh bubbles up despite her best efforts. She doesn’t quite know what to do with that look of his, the one she was so sure only hours ago, was the result of a morbid fascination for the strange and the hideous. Now she’s less sure. Much less. Uncertainty jabs an elbow into her stomach and she tries to cover for her inexplicable laugh with a joke and a smile that’s a cross between a wince and a grin.

“When you get the chance, you should swing by the Milky Way. There's millions just like me over there.”

Jaal’s chuckle booms out, far louder and far more amused than her lame attempt at a joke merited. “I doubt that very much.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Drop by and say hi to me on my tumblr: [@Dulcidyne](http://dulcidyne.tumblr.com/) or leave a comment, I absolutely love talking about anything and everything Mass Effect.


	4. Fine-Tuning

Se-ah makes it ninety-seven minutes before clawing away the sheets and rolling clumsily out of bed. At least, attempting to. Mid-roll, her legs tangle up in twisted fabric and one knee wrests free only to smack hard against the deck. Hissing out a choice curse, she stops struggling and lets artificial gravity do the rest of the work of pulling her down one centimeter at a time until she’s lying in a heap on the blessedly cold decking panels.

By the time she flops over onto her back, the overhead of the compartment is where it belongs. She knew it would be. She didn’t _actually_ believe it was inching down lower and lower, getting closer with every rapid, shallow breath. This is the Tempest, not a Prothean temple ruin in a cheesy action/adventure vid--the ones with archeologists who have a better working knowledge of verbal zingers than proper site excavation.

Groaning, she rips off the transdermal patch nestled into the crook of her arm. A mild sedative. Lexi’s idea when the melatonin supplements didn't make a dent in her godawful sleeping habits--or convince her brain to stop imagining that the Pathfinder’s cabin was attempting to kill her.

It's almost insulting how little effort her subconscious puts into this. Why can't the crushing weight of her inherited responsibilities manifest in a less obvious metaphor? Why can't she imagine herself pinned beneath a pile of old-school Blasto merchandise every night?

“SAM, do you have any sway in that department? I'm officially filing a complaint.”

“While within my capacity, neural modification of this nature has not been tested and therefore cannot be recommended.”

Reluctantly, she drags herself up off the floor. Her legs are killing her. “It was just a joke, SAM.”

“Noted. Should I notify Dr. T’Perro regarding the state of your injuries?”  
  
She shakes her head. “It’s nothing I can’t handle. Just the side-effect of getting backhanded halfway across a landing platform by seven thousand kilos of kett-engineered menace.”

Really, she was lucky to escape the facility with nothing more than a fractured fibula, ruptured ligaments, and some deep tissue bruising. It was a lucky day all around. One no one was in the mood to celebrate.

Se-ah snatches up some more transdermal medi-gel patches on her way to the door. She slaps one on her smarting knee and adds a couple more to her thighs and lower back before pulling on her clothes.  
  
“Pathfinder, Dr. T’Perro highly stressed the need for rest.”

“I’m aware.”

She’s also aware that Lexi has the Moshae to tend to, which means she’s too preoccupied to check-in on the crew with minor fractures and bruises and make sure they’re getting the rest part of their R&R. “I just need to check something with Mags real quick.”

Not only is Jaal awake, but he doesn’t even look surprised to see her when the door opens. Instead, he glances up from the bench with expectant happiness and one knot in her stomach loosens just as another one tightens.

“Trouble sleeping?” he asks.

“No rest for the wicked,” she quips, examining the parts he's scattered over Maggie’s top. Reaching forward, she picks up a tiny capacitor from the jigsaw puzzle of metal pieces. Kett, judging from the symbols printed on the side. Not her specialty. Jaal dabbles in anything that takes his interest, like Liam, whereas she and Peebee share a passion for narrow focus.

He plucks the capacitor from between her fingertips, touch lingering. The disconcerting intensity of his gaze captures her startled glance before it can dart away.

“And...you've been wicked?” he asks, all careful enunciations and thoughtful pauses. Jaal treats language the way he treats tech, taking the time to consider each component before he fits them all together into a working whole.

Maybe it’s the last dregs of the sedative still churning around in her bloodstream like alcohol minus the splotchy flush. Maybe it’s the fresh memory of three simple words, ‘fascinating’, ‘special’ and ‘strange’, curling up around her ribcage and squeezing her so tight she still can’t quite catch her breath. Maybe her cabin really was rigged to kill and she’s in the most unexpected version of the afterlife ever. _Heaven is real and it has angara._

Or maybe…he’s flirting with her?

She doesn’t quite know what do or how to respond, so Se-ah filches another piece off the bench--a metal-capped glass cartridge containing coils of wire--just for the excuse to look away. By the time she looks up again, a playful smile is pulling up at the corner of her mouth. It’s half defense mechanism. A familiar tactic in her ‘Avoiding Emotional Risks’ playbook: when in doubt, make light of the situation.

As if her heart isn’t pounding against her sternum, she teases, “Are you flirting with me right now?”

There are two things she knows about Jaal Ama Darav. The first is that he is unflinchingly candid. The second is that the look of utter bafflement on his face is the exact match to the one he had when she stuck her hand out, unthinking, for the universe’s most awkward handshake. Together they mean she’s milliseconds away from complete humiliation.

“No.”

Yup, she’s in the afterlife alright and _not_ the good one.

“Is it customary for humans to flirt with questions about someone’s perception of poor moral character?” The concept clearly perturbs him the more he considers it. At least, that’s what it sounds like. She can’t actually see on account of burying her burning face into her cupped palms. The kett fuse digs into her cheek, cool glass rapidly warming against her skin.

“No, it’s not. Just forget I said anything, please.”

“I apologize--there’s something I’ve missed.” Fabric whispers as he draws closer to brush fleeting fingers over her wrists. The request is unspoken but every subtle shade of feeling hums through her. Plaintive. Undemanding. Kind. _Please look at me._

She does.

He’s closer than she expects, standing in front of her, head tipped down so that he can meet her eyes despite the differences in their height. The gust of her shallow breath breaks over his collar before eddying back towards her smelling like Jeju tangerines and sandalwood soaked in hibiscus tea with a curl of cinnamon bark--and simultaneously nothing like any of that. Every cell in her body lights up with the disorienting sensation she gets during a-grav failure, forces tethering her down snapping away until she is weightless and floating adrift in the intoxicating current.

Embarrassment flash evaporates and she laughs into her steepled hands before letting them slide down the rest of the way past the tip of her nose and over her lips--the fuse still cradled in between her thumb and index finger. He’s already pulled back, taking the warm pocket of tangerine and sandalwood air with him. Which is good, she tells herself. Jaal being that close is dangerous for coherent thought.

“Just a miscommunication,” she says, trying to alleviate the traces of dismay still lingering in his eyes. “Asking someone if they’ve been wicked--most humans...well, most Milky Way species that I’m familiar with, would read that as an innuendo.”

The word clearly does not translate. “Like a sexually suggestive insinuation, which is how we flirt for the most part--double meanings that hint at interest instead of...more overtly conveying it, if that makes any sense? Not everyone is subtle of course, I mean, you’ve met Peebee. Are angara similar?”

Jaal makes a small, frustrated noise. “Some, to an extent-- _I_ am not in the habit of veiling my interest. I have little patience for it. But, no, my confusion has more to do with _why_ wickedness has another meaning that is sexually suggestive. It’s equivalent in Shelesh is…”

He struggles to come up with a translator-proof explanation. “It’s a word we associate with deep moral wrong. It has _nothing_ to do with physical intimacy.”

“Ah.” And she thought idioms were troublesome for the translators. Idioms have nothing on the grab bag of culture-specific double meaning, nuance, and subtlety that constitutes flirtation. Hell, she’s had her fair share of romantic miscommunications in her own native tongue. _Do you like me or do you like me? Did you mean hot or hot?_

She sets the fuse down before she can forget about it and drop it. Glass clicks against the bench top. “I’m not actually sure. SAM?”

“I would venture that the ironic usage arises from certain ancient cultures viewing sexual acts as amoral. But this is not my area of expertise.”

Jaal nods. “I see.” There’s no judgment in his voice. It’s distant, lost in thought.

“The phrase ‘No rest for the wicked’ references eternal torment depicted in the religious text--”

“Thank you SAM, but it was just a joke. A terrible joke. It really doesn’t need further explanation.”

Se-ah leans a hip against Maggie and exhales slowly. Objectively, she should be humiliated over this latest misstep. Anyone else and there would be two weeks of careful avoidance and pained, awkward silences--hard to manage on a frigate this size but she’s done longer in smaller spaces. But Jaal is...different.

“A joke. That is...reassuring. I was concerned for you. I’m thankful for your decision on Voeld. But neither of us are blind to the cost.”

He looks at her. “And you’re the one who must bear the burden of that knowledge.”

So he’d interpreted her joke as a crisis of self-doubt. Only someone with the emotional sensitivity of a potato could misread _that_ for flirting.

“I don’t believe in doubting decisions after I’ve made them,” she says but the answer has all the mechanical automation of something memorized and then recited. It’s an Alec Ryder answer. Dad wasn’t one for regret. He wasn’t one for giving up a tactical advantage either, even when it came with a cost.

Willing the ‘stand at attention’ rigidity out of her spine, she tries for something that doesn’t sound like she had to study it for an exam, “Just how I was raised. My dad...once we made a decision, we had to stick to it. Good or bad. When I was seven, I got it into my head that I wanted to learn the same instrument as my best friend. The _kithara,_ this massive 20-string zither--asari, which is important because they spend entire centuries becoming proficient. I was _terrible_. I was terrible even after ten years of daily practice, which Scott always argued constituted a violation of anti-torture Citadel Council Conventions.”

Jaal chuckles, full and deep and she flashes a wistful smile. Her baby brother, always and forever a little shit. “It didn’t matter though. It was my choice, I took responsibility for it, and that was all Dad cared about. Although, he never had to suffer through any of my recitals. He might’ve changed his mind then.”

Before she can stop them, the words are already out of her mouth. “He would’ve destroyed the facility.”

Her smile withers on her lips as if the words are poison. Maybe they are because she’s shaking her head, trying to clear the bitter-cyanide taste from her mouth. “It doesn’t change anything. I made my choice already knowing that and I’d make it again.”

Fingernails catch on the fabric over her elbows when she folds her arms, tight, across her chest. “I’m not beholden to his decisions. It doesn’t matter what he would’ve done.”

In the murky depths of her subconscious, something clicks to life and she can’t help but prod at it with blind, curious fingers. It feels like a jumble of sharp metal and glass fuses, coiled wires twisting snarls of conflicting feeling into an emotional trip mine. Instead of backing off and leaving the damn thing alone before it goes off, scattering fragments of pressurized grief like shrapnel, she teases out a tangled filament. Realizations strobe up in quick succession, blinding flare after blinding flare.

It's not that dad would've chosen differently, it's that _she_ would--the dead woman. Professional. Logical. Scott was still trapped in his cryopod and she suited up, business as usual. Mission first. That Se-ah was like her father and their cost-benefit analysis on Voeld would have gone much differently.

Scott’s derisive snort is sudden and clear at her ear. As if he’s standing right next to her, on the Tempest, like he should be, instead of lying comatose on a ship entire systems away. Where was that cost-benefit analysis on Habitat 7?  
  
She’s one breath away from tripping a full-blown detonation when Jaal spans the distance between them and settles steadfast hands on her shoulders, bracing her. It’s as close to a hug as her crossed-arms will allow but somehow he manages to make it feel like his arms are enfolding around her, drawing her against his expansive chest.

“I know very well what it’s like to stand in someone else’s shadow and lose sight of yourself.” One large hand drifts up from her shoulder to smooth over the line of her jaw. It’s so big, it spans from the point of her chin and past her earlobe. “Do you want to know what helped me?”

Throat dry, she gulps and his eyes flicker down to trace the faint, fluttering shadow of her adam’s apple. Not trusting herself to speak, Se-ah nods. Tousled hair slips over and parts, feather-light, around the fingers tipping past her ear and a tiny, almost imperceptible shiver travels from his skin into her scalp.   
  
“Being here. With you...and with your crew. I feel as if I can finally see myself clearly, see my purpose. I’m...illuminated. This galaxy is brighter and more beautiful than I’ve ever seen it before.”

Eyes impossibly luminous and impossibly blue, he curls his fingertips to capture the sifting amber fall of her hair. “That is your doing.”

Every word is a mote of stellar dust gleaming radiant in the air between them. They collect in her lungs with each stuttered breath and coalesce into a single incandescent point--a star in miniature forming in the lonely, neglected hollows of her heart. It’s singularly painful. Too dense and too heavy and too much.

Either she’s about to burst into tears or kiss him. Neither option is good, considering the circumstances. So she does nothing except go rigid and try to school her expression into something that doesn’t scream ‘I can’t handle this’. It does not work. She can feel it not working and what she can’t feel, she can infer from the look on Jaal’s face when he suddenly clears his throat and releases her.

 _Shit._ She scrambles for something, anything to convey how much his words meant to her without fully conveying _how much_ they meant to hear.  

“I--thank you. That’s really nice of you to...I’m...halad. I mean, glappy. Er...glad. I’m glad.”

It’s as close as she’ll get so she takes it. She also changes the subject before her heart pounds through her chest. “So uh--why are _you_ awake? You’re usually out by now.”

Jaal shoots her a wry look like he’s just caught her trying to bluff her way through a bad hand in one of Gil’s poker games. But he lets it slide. “I couldn’t sleep. Your ship is a wonder but it is very quiet. Angara live communally and I find it difficult to rest without snores buzzing through the walls.”

She can finally breath easy enough for a halfway decent laugh. “You could always bunk with Drack. No chance of quiet there.”

He gives her a pointed look. “Most nights, there’s no chance of quiet in here either.”

 _Ah._ Her absent-minded habit of humming to herself when she’s concentrating. The omni-blade temperature trials aren’t exactly whisper-quiet either. And then there’s Maggie’s array of beeps and chimes.

“So that’s the reason you never kicked me out? I’m your ambient noise machine?”

Jaal’s laugh is a quiet rumble in his big chest. “I don’t know what that is but I can safely say that is not the reason. I never ask you to leave because I enjoy your presence, immensely. “  
  
“See,” he adds to clarify. “ _Now_ I’m flirting with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ho boy! First off, thank you all for your wonderful kudos and comments. I'm beyond blown away by the lovely response to this fic and to Se-ah. You're all amazing, I wish you days filled with adorable pink aliens. 
> 
> SO, this chapter was initially a bit shorter but the initial back-and-forth flirtation with Jaal just did not gel well with me for some reason. So I had to go back, transcribe every bit of dialogue pre and post-Voeld, as well as watch all the Youtube videos to see why and I realized that while I liked the line, it didn't actually make sense for him to say it the way I initially imagined it. One, because Jaal's flirtation style is almost not even flirtation as I think about it. He pretty much consistently just puts it all out there. Guy is one for candor. Even some things like his 'hot or hhott' comment to Cora strike me more as him trying to get a handle on double meanings (maybe because he's run into that particular one before and was confused about it, and I'll attribute that imagined exchange to Liam). And it kind of impressed on me that 1) translators are ME's biggest magic wand ever and 2) I would make an ASS out of myself trying to flirt in a second language, hands down. I also realized that the only reason 'wicked' works as innuendo is because of the cultural context that angara, canonically, do not have. They just don't have moral hang-ups over sex and if idioms don't translate well, I'm willing to bet that cultural context doesn't either.
> 
> Things that really made me happy while writing this chapter: throwing shade at Indiana Jones, heaven but with angara, the word 'glappy'.  
> How many times I listened to Aurora's cover of "Nature Boy" because it reminds me of Jaal: I can't actually count this so I'll rely on hyperbole--2.5 thousand times.


	5. Inspecting

_Good in theory_. Her new life motto. If there’s a tattoo parlor in Kadara port (and why wouldn’t there be? Every seedy underbelly of the galaxy needs an equally seedy tattoo parlor), she’s going to get it embossed across her forehead. Double shielding? Good in theory. In execution, however…

Se-ah can’t remember if she washed her hair already, so she upends the Vetra-procured, limited-edition ‘Blasto Saves Christmas’ novelty shampoo bottle and vivid, gelatinous pink goops out onto her palm. She doesn’t know if the brand-marketing geniuses had ‘irradiated slime’ in mind when they rolled this product out, or if something terribly wrong happened during 600 years of dark space, but she doesn’t care and lathers it into her hair anyway. It doesn’t burn and it smells decent so long as you happen to enjoy the scent of congealed Tupari sports drink, which she does.

SAM tried to warn her. It wasn’t just the spatial issue of enclosing one kinetic shield within another on that scale, although that was a two-day migraine for her and Jaal, it was the _power draw_. Shields draw a huge amount from her hardsuit’s power cells. And while the omni-tool interface in her armor is wired on a separate circuit to avoid--

Pausing, she examines the shampoo bottle in her hand. Did she wash her hair already? A shower sounded like a good alternative to shouting at _Margaret_ when the last power cycling trial turned up the same results as all the other ones before. Bad results, _‘try this in the field and you’ll short out your shields’_ results. But while water a few degrees below scalding is doing wonders for her healing injuries, what she really needs is some sleep.

Sleep. Another ‘good in theory’ idea.

Frustrated, she rips up the rest of a half-peeled away ‘Sale!’ sticker from Blasto’s face (er...the hanar equivalent of a face) printed onto the front of the bottle.

“This one knows if you’ve been bad or good,” she reads aloud from the quote bubble no longer covered by the sticker.

As far as cinematic masterpieces go, ‘Blasto Saves Christmas’ is criminally underrated no matter what Liam says. How could anyone hate the movie that gave the galaxy the song _‘This one saw it’s genetic progenitor enkindling Santa Claus’_ ? And elcor Santa. _Jollily: Ho. Ho. Ho._

She slumps against the shower wall and watches ribbons of pink water vortex around the drain. Nothing ever goes the way it should.   

Beneath the crisply folded clothing just outside the shower, something begins to beep.  
  
“Pathfinder, workbench telemetry is indicating abnormal readings from sensors in the containment enclosures.”

“Oh, so that isn’t one of those ‘everything is fine’ alarms then?” she deadpans, her thumping pulse freefalling into her stomach.

Like all awe-inspiring things, Mags is as beautiful as she is deadly. At the core of her circuits and wires is a multi-million credit eezo heart paired to a thermionic converter. Both are triple shielded in their own sealed enclosures--or are supposed be, at any rate.

Puddling water all over the place, she snatches up her beeping omni-tool and opens Maggie’s remote access. Warnings pop up, rapid fire, from the internal ozone sensors. Her pulse wanders back up to her chest where it belongs.

“Eezo containment is unaffected. I suspect there has been a failure in the ozone scrubbers for the thermionic converter. Accumulated O3 concentrations are approximately 510% above normal in the containment enclosure,” SAM says.

Not eezo. But ozone is no joke either. While it’s great up in the stratosphere, crammed into a tiny room with mediocre ventilation, it’s a whole other animal. One with a taste for certain carbon bonds--like the ones in lung tissue or in rubber seals. Mags pumps out a staggering amount of the stuff during operation. Without scrubbers and the sealed enclosures, she could kill every person and machine in the lab.

“I’ll need to shut her off before I can take a look at what’s wrong. Maybe the catalyst is depleted already and we just need to replace the cartridge.”

Se-ah begins remote shutdown commands, typing in an override to get past the twenty versions of the question ‘But are you _sure_ you want to initiate shutdown processes?’. In-between override commands and obnoxious prompts, she yanks her shirt down over her dripping hair and pulls on her Initiative-issued training shorts. Both cling, plastering over skin until splotches of water tie-dye wet shadows across the fabric.

“Hang in there Mags,” she mutters before beelining for the tech-lab at a steady clip.

She collides into Jaal as soon as the door opens. Reflexively, he grips her by the elbow with a massive hand before she can fall back onto her rear. Her breath hitches while the persistent ache in her chest fusions unbearable heat. She does her best to ignore it. A difficult task when half her sleep-deprived focus is parsing out the scent he’s wearing today into Milky Way equivalents. It’s bright and brisk; night-blooming cereus blossoms, pale as moonlight and tipped in the cold starlight on the East Face of Mt. Whitney--her first real climb.

He must’ve woken up when she went to shower because he’s already dressed in his armor and holding a datapad that is currently slipping out of his grasp. Repositioning it before it can tumble to the ground, he smiles at her as if she’s a gift the universe has left on his doorstep.  
  
“Ah, Ryder, good. I was just about to go looking for you. Your Maggie has been beeping, very insistently, and--”

Brow furrowing, he releases her elbow and reaches out and catch a water droplet beading off her earlobe. “You’re wet.”

Se-ah steps back in the guise of looking him over to confirm that she’s left a damp print behind in the fabric of his _rofjinn._ “And now, so are you--sorry about that.”

Wincing, she tries to pat away the moisture even though the gesture is absolutely useless without a towel. With a pained smile, she withdraws her hands and adds, “And sorry about the alarm waking you up.”

“The fabric is capable of enduring a little water. It would make a poor garment if it could not. And I was already awake, there is no need to apologize.” The datapad in his hand slips down a few centimeters again and she’s close enough to glimpse a portion of the screen no longer obscured by his thumb. It doesn’t look technical. A personal letter maybe?

“Were you writing home?”

“Ah, no. I am not.” Jaal directs half his answer down to the decking when he notices that she does not have shoes on. Has he never seen human feet before? She wiggles her toes at him.

Further elaboration isn’t coming. She smothers the impulse to ask for it. Maggie. She’s here to take a look at Maggie, not pry into Jaal’s personal communications. And definitely _not_ to ask the heart-racing question clamoring in the back of her mind. _Who then? Someone special?_ Back to business, she offers a nod before making her way past his broad frame. Jaal follows her back into the lab, reabsorbed with his mysterious missive.

Maggie is as sullen and uncommunicative as a kid sent to time-out for misbehavior. Displays dark, mass effect fields vanished, no hums or whirs, beeps or chimes. It’s like she’s giving her the silent treatment, turning a metal shoulder with a sulky ‘hmph’. Se-ah frowns, running a hand over the glossy top. No resonant hum meets her fingertips.

“Pathfinder, you will be able to access the scrubber via the panel located near the floor on the side closest to the bulkhead. It is five centimeters to the right of the duct leading to the general ventilation system.” SAM informs her.

Of course it is. Delicately, she goes about leveraging herself down to the decking without straining her injured leg. She manages, with little grace and a lot of jerky, uncontrolled motions, to lie on her side so that she can hook her hands around the corner of the bench and pry open the least-accessible panel ever. The catalyst chamber slides out one centimeter at a time, smelling vaguely of wet stone, and she has to wiggle closer to bring her arm up to scan it.

Only...she doesn’t need to scan it, the chamber slides out all the way and she can see now that half the cartridge slots are empty. Someone’s taken them.

“Did you locate the problem?” Jaal asks, louder than she expected him to be. He’s come to kneel behind her, the datapad still in hand but momentarily forgotten again.

“Not yet,” she hisses, furious. “But when I do, I’m throwing her out the airlock.”

 _After_ she gets her cartridges back. Se-ah pushes off the decking into a crouch, too angry to remember the barely-healed ligament she’s supposed to rest for at least a few more days. As her thighs flex, ready to spring her up from the deck, wrenching spasms swarm up from her knee.   
  
“Ow--fuck. Fuck.”

Somehow, when she crumple-slides back down, she ends up sitting, legs stretched in front of her, with her back against the tech bench. It feels like smacking down on the landing platform all over again--if the landing platform were covered in fire ants. Bright pinpoints fizzle and pop across the backs of her eyelids in time with the cramp. Thudding her head back twice to clear them, she directs a steady stream of profanity up towards the overhead of the compartment while digging her fingernails into her skin to take an edge off the pain with tactile stimulation.  

“Let me,” Jaal offers and she nods her assent vigorously, unable to speak through her clenched teeth. Unable to _think._ The missing cartridges, Maggie, they both slip into the static, forgotten.

Something falls to the ground, a soft ‘whumph’ of displaced air. Eyes still screwed shut, she can’t see what he’s dropped. But she realizes it is his glove when his bare fingers press against the skin of her inner thigh, just above her knee. Electricity hums, a low-frequency vibration rolling mild warmth up over the expanse of fluttering muscle mapped out beneath his fingertips and the base of his palm.

It’s like he’s flipped a switch on the pain. It vanishes before she can blink open her disbelieving eyes. Twitching sarcomeres relax and fall into the pulsing electrical lullaby. Relief precipitates off her lips into a breathy laugh.

“That’s a nice trick.” She watches as his hand smoothes careful circles against her leg.

“While you’re having a conversation with my muscle cells, can you tell them to get their act together before we get to the Nexus tomorrow?”  
  
Smile tugging at his lips, he meets her eyes. “Talking to your cells...that’s a different way of looking at bioelectricity.” 

“Well that’s what it is, isn’t it? That’s how muscle cells communicate with each other--moving electric charges around. Which is exactly what you’re doing.” She tips a teasing smile at him. “You’re all talking about me aren’t you? About how terrible I am.”

Jaal’s laugh rumbles so loudly, his shoulders quake with mirth. “There are only good things to say about you.”

He says it so earnestly, despite the silliness, and she flushes. His hand stills and an electric pulse ripples out from his palm like a stone skipped over a pond. The voltage must be stronger because it’s warmer and it tickles a bit. Part of her wonders if he’d let her go at him with a multimeter next time he does that.

“Was that a good thing you said just now?”

“It was.”   
  
She recognizes his look for what it is. It’s the same face he uses to tell Liam the wrong definitions to things. The face that has Gil worried about his personal winning streak. Inscrutable, with a deceptive hint of innocence. She knows better. He’s messing with her, just waiting for her to play into his hands and ask for further explanation. It would serve him right for her not to give into her own curiosity and derail the joke altogether.

“So…are you going to tell me?”

Ah well, she tried. 

Leaning forward, he holds her gaze as he swipes a curled hand beneath the dripping lock of hair that had untucked itself from behind her ear. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a water droplet catch the light as it slips down over the surface of his glove.

“Of course not.” He looks pretty damn smug. “It was a secret.”

She likes the idea of his secret pressed into her cells for safe-keeping. The thought makes her greedy. She wants more. She wants to collect secrets from him, store them up in her motor synapses like muscle memories.

She wants to give him secrets of her own--intimate ones. The kind only roaming fingers and mouths can find. Stuttered gasps and hitched breath, shivers, trembling thighs and lips bitten full and red. All just for him, for his ears alone.

Desire evaporates off her damp skin like moisture, wicking into the space between them and changing it. The air feels charged and heavy and warm. It shimmers, refracting back mirage images of things that could be if she only reached out and plucked them off the horizon. Not just secrets. Habits. Shared jokes. Shared futures.

His breath stills and for a moment she thinks he can see it too. She thinks he wants it too.

Beneath the palm still on her thigh, a prickle rushes over her bare skin. It stipples the full length of her legs, the lab’s excellent lighting throwing her goosebumps into high relief. Jaal must feel the subtle change because his gaze falters down to her legs. Concern meets fascination.  
  
“What’s--Ryder, your skin is _changing._ ”

“Yeah, it’s not permanent.” She runs a hand over the top of her thigh, brushing against the tips of all the tiny vellus hairs standing on end. “It happens when all these little muscles under our skin contract. It’s kind of funny, they’re completely useless to us now--what we call vestigial.”

“Ah. How are they useless? What are they meant to do?”

“Well, back before our evolutionary ancestors decided to get rid of it, they used to puff up our thick body hair.”

“Hair, like--” He gestures towards the damp lock lying against her cheek.

“Yup, only all over and much shorter. When it puffs up, it makes animals look bigger than they actually are and it also traps air, which is insulating and keeps the animal warm. We lost the hair but we kept the muscles and they still respond to threats and cold.”

“You’re cold?”

“No, I’m fine,” she assures him but a pained look flickers across his face. The electric pulse radiating out from his palm gives an erratic stutter. He must have to concentrate to some extent in order to use the bioelectricity in this way. Apparently, what she said had shattered it.

Guilt swims up in his eyes, which flit away to the datapad he’d set down beside him. “Ryder, if I--”

 _Threats and cold._ The bright little star of emotion inside her feels like it is collapsing in under its own weight and taking her lungs with it. He thinks…

“No, that’s--I mean, there are other things that trigger the response, not just those two things. I mean, I get them all the time when I’m climbing or when I’m listening to beautiful music...”

_Or when someone I’m attracted to touches me._

“...no one really knows why. It’s not that beautiful music or incredible views are threatening to me or--”

She’s babbling. If she doesn’t put a stop to it, she’ll go all night. He’s meeting her eyes again and there’s no shocked guilt left so she does them both a favor and just takes a deep breath.

“Maybe...they are,” he says. “Beauty can be terrifying.”

She tries to deflect with a weak laugh. “If that’s the case, I’m a bigger coward than I thought.”

It has the opposite effect. Jaal only grows more serious and frustration with her furrows up in his brow. Fair enough, she’s frustrated with herself too. She _is_ a coward, trying desperately to obscure her own feelings from herself and from him. Because she’s afraid.

“Cowardice and fear are different things. One is shameful, the other is not. Angara are not ashamed to fear beauty. It is an affirming feeling for us, one we cherish. To be in awe is to know something vast and incredible, to be moved beyond the realm of what we know and be lost in beauty. We call it ‘glimpsing the threads’. It is...sacred to us. Isn’t that what you feel when you climb?”

“It is,” she admits. Too little truth given too late. She owes the both of them more than that. But emotional cowardice is a learned habit. One that, until recently, she never thought much about changing. Why would she? It always worked well for her in the past. It worked well for her father. The alternative looked...messier, more contentious, like Scott’s series of heartbreaks.

“I didn’t tell you that...I’m glad you decided to stay.” A small waver works it’s way through her voice. “I should’ve said...before we got to Aya yesterday. I wanted to but the truth is, I was relieved not to have to. But you deserve to know that I am...really happy you’re here.”

Another distinctive electric pulse tingles out from his palm and her goosebumps are back, tracing the path the electrons take from the tip of his fingers to the base of his hand.   
  
“That was my thank you,” he tells her, warmth in his eyes.

She smiles and then asks the question still lingering in the periphery of her mind, just out of sight like the datapad.   
  
“So who were you writing when I came in? Someone special?”

His eyes don’t leave hers and she can see reflections in them, a hundred shimmering, refracting possibilities.

“Yes. Someone very special.”

* * *

 

She’s standing in front of the Tempest escape pod when SAM’s notification comes.

“Pathfinder. You have new email at your terminal.”

The door is already hissing open and Peebee is standing there, looking at her like she’s lost it.

“Ryder, why the hell are you just standing in front of my door? And why the hell are you grinning? Oh shit...this is about the cartridges, isn’t it? Okay, okay before you do whatever you’re planning, can I just say that I was going to give them back? Ryder...okay, you’re officially freaking me out. Mission accomplished.”

Se-ah spares Peebee a distracted glance. “Oh, yeah, uhm...just...put them back where you found them. I have to--I just need to check my email.”

She’s across the bridge in a handful of elated heartbeats, opening the message from Jaal.

_Dearest..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was in a bit of a rush to get this out because I am currently moving across the country, so I haven't had time to do any thorough editing. Thank you guys soo much for the amazing response and feedback. It means so much, they're the bright little spots in these insane weeks of packing, driving, strange cities, and my slow-dawning terror that I only have 21 days of not having to worry about physiology, labs, slides, and getting enough sleep. 
> 
> Mmm, I had some notes on this chapter, what were they...oh. Blasto Saves Christmas may be my all-time favorite bit of ME:2 background world-building. Hilarious. I couldn't resist. I had maybe three other hanar spins on Christmas classics but I decided to spare everyone the full list lol. Jaal as a walking TENS/PEMF unit has been a headcanon of mine for some time now and I'm glad to be able to finally put it down to figurative paper. I know the science is a bit ehh on the efficacy of TENS with long-term pain reduction but it definitely is supported for short-term use. I did find some studies on PEMF for long-term pain reduction that looked pretty promising for osteoarthritis, which is pretty cool! I know there is some lingering debate over whether or not goosebumps actually qualify as vestigial or not. I decided to stick with what I learned in undergrad--that they are. 
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading!


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